Oral Storytelling Web

Change of stories

Myth is a language made of timeless, not of momentary, forms. The themes [of performance improvised by Haida storytellers for anthropologist John Swanton] are not concocted for this occasion. They are original in a different sense. They are thousand- or ten-thousand-year-old stories put to current use; they renew the present world by rehearsing what is known of how the world came to be.

Robert Bringhurst, A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1999: 220